


Women of Revolution: The Doctor

by Corycides



Series: Women of Revolution [4]
Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 05:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite the fact that women are recruited into the militia, we never seem to see any of them. Assuming that General Monroe isn’t keeping them in a pen outside, what are they doing?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Women of Revolution: The Doctor

The militia was a lonely place to be sometimes. Civilians hated you and every time you made friends you’d be re-assigned. After a few years anyone who hadn’t got themselves killed found a way to shorthand the process. When the nights got long and enough whiskey had been drunk to pass for intimacy, the question of choice was ‘where were you when?’. 

Of course, there was also some zit-faced little recruit, with haunted eyes and fevered loyalty, who didn’t know the unspoken rules of that.

‘Where you were you, Captain Tallifer?’ the newest one asked, sitting bolt upright on his stool in the middle of the infirmary tent. His arm stank still, burned flesh and a hint of infection, and he was disconcertingly still.

They were alone in the middle of camp, waiting for the patrols to get back. The camp doctor and her new orderly. Speaking of which, time to set her boundaries.

‘Doctor,’ Fix corrected, reaching for the bottle and pouring herself a shot. The farmer who’d sold it to them had called it whiskey, but it tasted more like something you’d suck out of a gas tank.

Still, beggars can’t be choosers. Not if they object to being sober beggars.

She picked up the glass with two fingers and tossed it back, blinking at the taste. The recruit stared at her. ‘Militia rank supersedes any civilian rank.’

Fuck, he was a broken little thing. Fix hated herself for being part of what made him like that enough to take another shot. Unfortunately, her tolerance was enough these days that it didn’t even take the edge off.

‘Yeah, well, there’s three Captains in camp,’ she said, slouching back and propping her feet one on top the other. ‘One doctor. When you’re gut-shot and hollering for help, who do you want running to your side?’

It was cruel to poke the recruits. Fix did it anyhow. She figured their best of putting themselves back together was to start doubting their indoctrination as soon as possible. And thank all the gods she’d quit believing in about one year in to this new world that she’d been grandfathered into the rank without having to go to a camp.

‘Doctor,’ the recruit corrected uncomfortably. ‘When the lights went out, where were you?’

She took a scratchy breath, but didn’t reach for the bottle again. Two shots kept her upright and steadied her hands, more and she didn’t stop. It wouldn’t have passed muster in a real hospital, but people round here were happy as long as she kept functioning.

When the lights went out Fix had been in the ER, trying to find a vein in a zoned-out junkie’s arm that hadn’t given up the ghost. Not having much success either. Then the monitors had fritzed off and the lights went out. Everyone had gone still, expecting the back-up generator to kick in any second now. 

Only it hadn’t. Then people started to die. ICU had been hit hardest – too many machines that couldn’t be replaced by desperate hands – but the neonatal unit was the ward no-one wanted to go to.

In hospitals people expected doctors to be gods, doctors expected to be gods. Yet they’d no idea what was happening, no idea how to fix it. All they could do was endless triage – until the looters came.

A year later Fix came out the other side with a drug habit, a scar on her face and nightmares that woke her sick to her stomach in the night. The scar she got used to, the drug habit was easy to drop once the drugs ran out and the nightmares got friends.

‘How old are you?’

’18?’ he said, obviously lying. Volunteer then. Younger kids got scooped up all the time, press-gangs didn’t ask a lot of questions, but they kept up appearances in the villages. Only 18 year olds, or those desperate enough for a hot and a cot that they’d like about it, got signed up there.

‘You remember before?’ she asked, waving one hand vaguely. Her thin, clever fingers poking out of the holes in her roughly knot woolen mittens. ‘The lights, the noise, the sense of constant connection? Do you have a facebook page out there, just waiting to be updated?’

He shook his head hesitantly.

‘Then you don’t ask that fucking question,’ Fix took him. ‘You didn’t go through it, you don’t ask. Do you want to tell me about the camp?’

His whole face somehow managed to twitch and this time his head-shake was emphatic. 

‘You don’t get to ring it up, if someone wants to tell you they will,’ she told him. ‘There are people who do. Others won’t answer, or they’ll kick your ass for bringing it up. Strausser will tell you and then you’ll be sorry.’

He gave her a polite smile, like she was joking. She was not. Strausser was not someone that you wanted to swap bedtime stories with. He wasn’t even someone that should know you slept, ever.

The sound of galloping horses broke the silence of the night. Fix heaved a sigh and pushed herself to her feet, reaching for her coat. 

‘Right,’ she told the kid, who was on his toes vibrating with a desire to serve. ‘This is gonna be shit, you understand that? Nobody gets pain-relief unless they’re going to get better. We’re short on opiates, so we can’t waste any. The Colonel will take care of the rest, you got it?’

He looked sick and scared and much younger than 16. ‘But…the militia takes care of its own?’

‘Yeah,’ Fix said, tying back her heavy twists and pinning them. Sometimes she thought about shaving them off, but it seemed too military. ‘And sometimes that isn’t easy, or pretty.’


End file.
